Big data is proving to be the biggest differentiator between successful businesses and those that struggle against their competitors. There are a lot of benefits that force businesses to pay attention to big data now. There are insights into everything, from operations to customers to even new products. Unfortunately, this realization has businesses scampering to come up with their own big data initiatives. And in all that haste, a lot of things are not thought out properly.
One of the things that are often overlooked is analytics. Businesses tend to focus on how to get the data, what data to gather and where to store the data. Some businesses neglect to plan ahead on what to do with the data and how to make sense of the data that they’ve gathered.
In short, businesses think about how to gather the data but not on how to analyze that data and what to make out of it.
To be able to effectively work with big data, you would need to have a dedicated infrastructure for analytics. You would need infrastructure that would be able to compute data fast. What’s the use of amassing a huge amount of data every second if you would need to wait days or weeks for your infrastructure to analyze it? You may be getting a lot of information from different sources but you cannot do anything with it unless you have your machines analyze it.
What’s more, you should be very wary of siloed information, or storing your data into different machines or partitions. So you would need an infrastructure that would be able to handle all your data in one place.
It should also be scalable. You may be happy working with 75 terabytes of data now, getting your analytics done in an acceptable time frame. But once you get more and more data from more and more sources, you should be able to build up your analytics system to handle that influx of data.
More than this, you should consider getting an analytics system that could easily get you and your data on the cloud.
Lastly, you should consider whether or not you would be able to use your new analytics infrastructure with your legacy systems. Be sure that your new analytics systems would be able to work with the system that you are using now.
You simply cannot have all these in your current systems. So if you are going to invest, it is much better to start looking at dedicated systems for analytics. Something like the Oracle Big Data Appliance.
Oracle Big data Appliance can help you get into big data fast at a very low cost of ownership. It allows you to run batch and real-time data processing. And it is perfectly scalable to grow as your business needs grow. You can even have management capabilities integrated. And if your legacy systems include other Oracle software, you would find that it works well with that too. Oracle Big Data Appliance works compatibly with Oracle Database, Oracle Exadata and other software using Oracle Big Data Connectors.
Photo courtesy of Kevin Krejci.
